THE EMERGENCE OF YURI ANDROPOV

By John M. Burns

Published: November 6, 1983

ANDROPOV

New Challenge to the West. A Political Biography. By Arnold Beichman and Mikhail S. Bernstam. Introduction by Robert Conquest. 255 pp. New York: Stein & Day. $16.95. AFTER BREZHNEV Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s. Edited by Robert F. Byrnes. 457 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cloth, $25. Paper, $12.50. ANDROPOV By Zhores Medvedev. 227 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. $14.95. THE ANDROPOV FILE The Life and Ideas of Yuri V. Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By Martin Ebon. 284 pp. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. $16.95. YURI ANDROPOV A Secret Passage Into the Kremlin. By Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova. Translated by Guy Daniels with the authors. Illustrated. 302 pp.

New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. $15.95.

ON Thursday it will be a year since Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union for 18 years, rose from the breakfast table in his Moscow apartment to fetch something from his study, pitched forward onto the floor and died of a heart seizure. Within 54 hours, he was replaced by Yuri V. Andropov. Since the death of Lenin, each transition in leadership has been followed by important changes in the way the Kremlin does business. Even when Brezhnev succeeded Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, people everywhere, not only in the Soviet Union, sensed the importance of the change. By 1982, the reach of Soviet power was greater, and Brezhnev's leadership had become stultifyingly passive; there can have been few nations that did not recognize the impact a new leader in the Kremlin could have on the world as well as his own country.

So there was real urgency in Russia and abroad to find out more about Mr. Andropov. However, in a system that penalizes divergence from prevailing orthodoxies, predicting how one or another candidate for succession might handle the top job is a murky business. In Mr. Andropov's case, the problem was compounded by his emergence from 15 years in the shadows as the chief of the K.G.B. and by the skillful dissemination of glossy images of their former boss by K.G.B. personnel and Moscow officials with career links to Mr. Andropov. The notion they put out, of the former secret police chief as a closet liberal with Americanized tastes and a sneaking regard for dissidents, did not last long. But after he had opened his tenure by intensifying pressures on dissidents, tightening controls on culture and cracking down on the work force, there remained a range of questions about the new leader and his course in the long term.

Five new books attempt some answers, and they are not encouraging. For those who have been hoping that under Mr. Andropov the country might become a more congenial member of the international community or move toward a domestic society in which human values weigh more heavily in the calculus of the state, all the authors offer a depressing view. Their message is that the Andropov era will be a time of tightening discipline for Russians, which, coupled with limited industrial and agricultural reforms, may improve somewhat the dismal economic performance of the later Brezhnev years. But if the world is looking for a gradual turning away from a bankrupt ideology, from an elitist system to one of opportunity, from a police state to one that celebrates a noble conscience, these books firmly predict its hopes will be defeated. On these major points, there is virtually no divergence John M. Burns is the Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times. among writers with widely differing viewpoints. ''After Brezhnev'' consists of eight monographs by some of the most eminent American academic experts on the Soviet Union. Their conclusions are a distillation of a wider cooperative study that took 18 months and involved 35 men and women from 20 universities in the United States and Britain. The academics offer an analytical view based more on a knowledge of Soviet history, past transitions and the inner workings of the Soviet system than on a detailed study of the new leader, but their conclusions are little different from those of other writers, who take a biographical and anecdotal approach. If anything, the biographies, probing some of the darker corners of Mr. Andropov's past, offer a gloomier view. Four of the biographers are Soviet emigres, each in his way a casualty of Mr. Andropov's time at the K.G.B. Zhores A. Medvedev, the author of ''Andropov,'' the best of these personalized studies, is a biologist who fell afoul of the system, spent time as the K.G.B.'s guest in a psychiatric institution and now lives in London. Any personal bias he has is more than offset by the insights an educated Russian can offer and up-to-date material relayed to him by his twin brother, Roy, a dissident historian still living in Moscow, and by other Soviet sources.

Mikhail S. Bernstam is another emigre whose departure from his homeland owed something to Mr. Andropov's policies at the K.G.B. - specifically, his substitution of forcible or ''encouraged'' exile for the more brutal methods of suppression favored by earlier secret police chiefs. Mr. Bernstam, who came to the United States in 1976, is now a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, as is his collaborator, Arnold Beichman. In ''Andropov: New Challenge to the West,'' they offer some original research into Mr. Andropov's early career, which has been largely obscure until now. From their book we learn much of the ruthlessness and duplicity that enabled the former Volga boatman and film projectionist to catch the eyes of Stalin's henchmen and secure a major foothold in the Communist Party hierarchy before he was 40.